Really Stupid Stuff

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Painted Concrete Floors are beautiful!

What do you do when you are sick of crappy builder-grade
beige carpet? What about when said
carpet is gross, stained, and uh … really gross? And you have a few days to do a project? Well, we rip it up around here! Shut yo mouth! We do!
Rip it straight out of the floor.
And boy is it gross! The sheer
amount of dirt and dust under the carpet was GRODY! DIS-GUST-ING!
BLEH! So then what do you do?
Well Clark Kent and I find a solution that is inexpensive (i.e. not
laying bamboo hardwood imported from India or something) and easy (i.e.
not $20/sqft fancy tile from Italy that takes gluing, lining up, measuring,
more lining up, cursing because it’s not lined up, and more gluing and tons of
time). So we browsed ideas and found a
great one!

Concrete Putty – to fill in the holes left by the tack strips. Now, the blog we followed they skipped these
two things because they didn’t intend on keeping the painted concrete as a
final floor. I’d not recommend
that. Especially if your builder laid
the tack strips before the concrete dried and thus caused great chips to come up
in the floor.

Valspar Porch/Patio
Floor Paint made for painting concrete – base grey. If you want a lighter
color, get lighter color floor paint.
The shade of paint you choose determines the darkness of the stain. (We
got this at Lowe’s)

Behr Semi-Transparent
Concrete Stain – Chicory was the color we chose. It’s a reddish brown that goes well with our
walls and décor. (This came from Home Depot.
If you don’t want to make two trips then pick some floor paint from Home
Depot.)

Quikrete Wet Look
High Gloss Sealer – this coats the floor and protects it from kids, dogs,
toys, and everything else. It also makes
it nice and shiny, which is fancy. I
like fancy.

Woven Linen Rollers
– this is for the stain. It gives it
texture. Although Clark Kent says that
next time he’d likely get a pump sprayer for the stain, to get a more even coating. I like the texture the rollers gave it, so
you decide there.

Step One … Moving
out all the furniture and realizing how yuckaliscious your carpet is as denoted
by the “clean” spots where the furniture that hasn’t moved in 6 years has
been. Eww.

See the "clean areas" where the furniture was? yeah.

Removing furniture easy. Getting dogs out of pictures? Not so easy.

Where did the furniture go? To the foyer of course!

Step Two … Rip up
that carpet. Cut it into 2-3ft strips
and pull it up. Cough a lot at the sheer
dust that comes up as you are doing this and admire the yucky pet dander cloud
hovering over your head.

It was really gross. Why was carpet invented?

Step Three … Look
at the dirt and grossness and say “Oh my goodness, THIS is why our children
always have stuffy noses and terrible allergies. Why in the world was carpet invented
anyway? Dumbest idea ever.”

Yeah, that's the fine dust/dirt/yuck that was under the carpet padding.

Step Four ... Clean the floor. We used the Krud Kutter first, then we mopped it. I say "we" ... Clark Kent did that. But you can see the difference between the before and after. Our builders were kind enough to spill a 5 gallon bucket of primer all over the floor and then proceed to wipe it up with their fingers (what?!?) and walk all in it and around the floor and well, really, the guys were probably pretty ticked off they spilled an entire gallon of drywall primer anyway, right? That stuff really removed the spilled paint.

Step Five …
Remove tack strips. This is really hard and I admit I didn’t do a bit of
it. Clark Kent did all of it. Hard work.
Tiring hard work.

It's hard to get those strips up! Wear gloves!

Step Five … Walk
around and talk really loud. Everything
echoes. And look at your concrete. Here’s
where the tip of the day comes in. **If
you can’t stand imperfections in the concrete or cracks and dips and all that
where the builders didn’t wait enough time for the concrete to dry before they
started other parts of the house, you probably want to not do this project, put
a skim coat of fresh concrete down or at the least don’t use a high gloss
sealer.**

Echo! Echo! Echo!

Step Six … Fill
in the holes from the tack strips and any large chips in the concrete with the
Concrete Putty. And tape the walls. We taped newspaper up with painters tape. This is important because the stain is very
watery and tends to splash. Clark Kent just
painted our walls a year ago, and I like them nice and
un-stained-splattered. So this step was
important.

The hallway had more glue than the whole living room.

Step Seven …
Paint the floor. The paint is thick, so
one coat should do it. The idea is to get one uniform color before staining. Clark Kent went
around the edges first then rolled out the main part of the floor. This has to dry overnight before applying the
stain.

It's so ... grey.

Step Eight …
Stain the floor. Be sure to have stuff
covered and not wear nice shoes. The
stain splatters. We did 1 ½ coats of
stain. Mostly one coat, but going back
where there were obvious roller marks and giving it depth. This also has to set overnight before
applying the sealer coat. So admire
it. It will look great and you will be
so pleased! But it is not for kids or
dogs to be on. They are destructive by
nature, and thusly are banned from unsealed floors.

This is where you can adjust the color. More coats will give you a darker color.

Step Nine … Seal
the floors. It takes two coats of the
sealer to coat it well. You have to wait
at least two hours in between coats.
Then it has to set overnight to fully harden. After a few hours you can walk on it, but
don’t put the furniture back until the next morning.

Stephanie- I was reading your blog and I completely agree with you that builder grade carpet, especially beige, is DISGUSTING! Hence, the reason I was weighing the options of staining my floors. I do have a couple of questions though; 1) Does it still echo in the room? 2) Does the room feel colder since the removal of the carpet?

I can answer that for us. It does echo a little, mostly it's just a bit louder in there. And the room is a bit cooler, which now that it's up in the 80s is lovely. In the colder months we just wore house shoes or socks and were fine.

It is doing pretty well. We have a couple places that have come up. If I had to do it again, I would skip the painting of the grey paint part and just stain the concrete. I think it peeled up in those places because the paint peeled up from heavy traffic use (and 5 kids and 3 dogs).

About Me

I'm a mother of five beautiful kiddos and happily married to my love for 13 years. Life is crazy but great. Some days are easy, some days suck, but we get by. Because sometimes that's all you can hope for.